Books like Heirlooms — picked by fans

Sons and Soldiers tells the stories of the Ritchie Boys, a special military intelligence unit of the US Army in World War II trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland and made up of German-Austrian men, often German Jews who had fled Nazi persecution. These men had everything to lose: if they were captured and identified behind enemy lines, they would be killed on the spot. However, they also knew that their special knowledge of the German language and German culture gave them an advantage against Hitler’s army. The Ritchie Boys were critical to the Allied victory. Not surprisingly, those who survived went on to become leaders in American society, great heroes who understood that there are some things worth dying for. 

Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood Among the Nazis offers a nuanced glimpse of what it was like to grow up in Germany from 1928 to 1948. Author Jurgen Herbst joined the Hitler Youth or Jungvolk and became a leader because he supported a mythic German past. But the more involved he became as the war wore on, the more he understood and was deeply troubled by the nefarious basis of the National Socialist regime. His descriptions of how fascism slowly overcame a democratic country are particularly chilling. Captured at the end of the war by American forces, Herbst would learn even more of the horrors that had taken place in Nazi Germany, horrors that forced him to leave his home country for the US, pledging never to return.

Erika Dreifus’ collection of stories, Quiet Americans, offers a haunting, kaleidoscopic view of the Holocaust as it has reverberated through the lives of generations of American Jews right up to the present. Depicting, among them, a high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor, a Jewish-American soldier guarding a German POW, and a refugee returning to Europe against the backdrop of the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, these are stories, characters that have stayed with me even as I read this book more than ten years ago when it debuted. Dreifus is an expert at dissecting and reframing this dark chapter in human history and showing its effects on ordinary people. 

Born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, Irmgard Hunt witnessed the growth of fascist ideology among the people she loved during an otherwise idyllic childhood. As the shadow of World War II fell over the mountain, however, Hunt began to question and then disavow the Nazi doctrines she had accepted as a young child. As time went on and the regime crumbled literally before her eyes, she was vocal in confronting her country’s criminal past and in championing the democratic principles her elders had so easily dismissed.

Bart van Es tells the true story of how his grandparents were one of several families in the Netherlands who hid a young Jewish girl named Lientje during World War II.

It was extremely dangerous to do so. If found out, the Dutch family hiding her would have been arrested and sent off to one of the Nazi concentration camps. Van Es conveys a full sense of the tragedy involved when the girl’s parents give their beloved daughter to their friends as the only way to save her.

What’s unusual about this book is that Van Es tells two stories: his own journey as he tracks down Lientje in Amsterdam and her story of the terrible things she went through in hiding. Dutch “Jew hunting units” roamed the streets. Holland deported over 70% of their Jewish population to the Eastern camps.   

Singer, one of the great names in Jewish literature, takes his readers to turn of the century Eastern Europe and enfolds them in the hierarchy of Jewish society. He masterfully captures a way of life that flourished before the Second World War.

I was so engrossed in this powerful story I immediately began reading Singer’s other works. 

This moving story awakened new empathy in me for my extended Canadian family as they waited for news of us for so many years. It gave me a new understanding of the effects of war on families, even at such great distances. 

A daughter and granddaughter tells the story of her family’s escape from the holocaust in 1939. Safely in Canada, the country we left for Germany, in the same year, they fear for their family in Lithuania as telegrams of desperation arrive and news of events in Germany become known. 

I like the way the author weaves a unique tale of a Ukrainian family’s escape at the end of WWII with present-day events. The book demonstrates that WWII’s long-lasting impact on families was not limited to Germans and Jews. Like me and my children, the author had no part in the war, yet we are all impacted by it and its aftermath.

Takeaway Men is a novel that proves once again that you can never forget. Aron and Judy Lubinski and their twin daughters, Bronka and Johanna, leave a Displaced Person Camp in Poland and immigrate to America, hoping to build a new life and escape the horrors of the Holocaust behind them. Through the kindness of Izzy, a cousin that immigrated earlier to America, they settle in Izzy and his wife, Faye's home in Queens, NY. In their neighborhood, we meet other immigrants, survivors, all working hard to build a better life for themselves and their children. Each of the other characters has a different story. They bring another perception of how people try to deal with the experiences of loss, trauma, doubt, and everyday complexities of life. We see this most clearly in the inner thoughts of Aron and Judy. Their struggle is, at times, painful and sorrowful and affects… show more.

This controversial book was a Rorschach Test for the security community.

Some read it as a critique of the United States; others saw it as a call for pacifism; others saw it as an attack on Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. In fact, it was none of those things and all of them. Baker is a novelist who purchased a newspaper archive from the 1930s and 1940s and simply reprinted some of the stories contained therein. He offers little additional comments or interpretation.

The book is an anecdote to the idea that the Second World War was somehow the “good war.”  Like all others, it was barbarism; unlike all others, it was barbarism on a scale never seen before or since. And like all wars, it was, at its root, the story of common people victimized by their governments.